We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS is going to partner with Vola Software to provide 2 interns with opportunities for hacking open source and bootstrapping their careers!

Vola Software is a custom software development company in one of the poorest regions of the European Union and a long-time contributor to their local ecosystem via Vratsa Software Community. They are located in Vratsa, Bulgaria.

Internship program

Alexander Tsvetanov and Vladislav Ankov are joining the Kiwi TCMS team for a 10 month adventure until the end of July 2021 with the opportunity to continue for another year afterwards!

Both Sasho and Vladi are students in the Professional Technical Gymnasium in Vratsa and are required to work part-time as junior software developers during the last 2 years of their education. Given that they have very limited practical experience and the additional red tape around hiring youngsters many software companies directly avoid such kind of relationship. This creates a catch-22 circle for both employers who are looking to hire somewhat experienced young people and youngsters who are looking to advance their practical skills.

Here's where Kiwi TCMS steps-in! What better way to improve practical knowledge than contributing to an actively used and actively maintained open source software! We are nearing the 200K downloads mark on Docker Hub so changes made by Sasho and Vladi will be visible to a very big pool of our users and customers!

Both have already started their open source adventure last week and are currently going through some training. However they were faced with real problems which resulted in bug discovery and a pull request for python-bugzilla underlined by a 20 years old issue in Python. How's that for a start ?

Administrative

Vola Software is the direct employer for Sasho and Vladi because they have the necessary permits and experience required for hiring youngsters. Kiwi TCMS is the direct technical mentor and will be acting as a customer to Vola Software!

Vola Software will be paying a minimal salary to our interns as required by law. Kiwi TCMS will reimburse the full amount while Vola Software will be covering their accounting and administrative expenses. Both Sasho and Vladi will also be eligible for our open source bounty-program as an extra stimulation!

All expenses will be fully transparent and visible via our Open Collective page!

Help us do more

If you like what we're doing and how Kiwi TCMS supports various communities please help us!

• Donate via Open Collective as low as 1 EUR;
• Nominate Kiwi TCMS as GitHub Stars;
• Become a customer and we'll share our profits with the community

Thanks for reading and happy testing!

We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS is going to partner with the MLH Fellowship open source program which is a 12 week internship alternative for students interested in becoming software engineers.

Major League Hacking (MLH) is a mission-driven B-Corp focused on empowering our next generation of technologists. Every year, more than 100,000 developers, designers, and makers join the MLH community to gain hands-on experience and build their professional networks. They are headquartered in the Greater New York Area, USA but operate world-wide.

Fellowship program

The Fall 2020 cohort runs between October 5 - December 21 and we're already into the Contributing phase of the program. Fellow students will be working on open issues from our backlog with a focus on tasks from our open source bounty program but they can really work on any open task!

Once a pull request has been made it will undergo first round code review by Cory Massaro who is the dedicated MLH Python mentor. Once Cory gives the +1 each pull request will be reviewed by a member of the Kiwi TCMS core team like usual.

To minimize the risk of conflicts between contributors we are going to apply the following rules:

• Each MLH fellow would add a comment on the issue they are interested in (applies to other contributors too);
• The issue will be assigned to them (new);
• The issue will be labeled with the MLH Fellowship label (new);
• The following comment will be added: This issue/bounty has been assigned to an MLH fellow who is currently working on it. Pull requests towards the same issue from other contributors will not be considered at this time. Please pick something else to work on!

Upon successful completion of tasks all MLH fellows will be eligible to claim their bounties via our Open Collective page. This is the same process other contributors go through, there is no difference.

Kiwi TCMS commits 2 core-team members who will serve office hours on the MLH Fellowship Discord server for couple of hours per week in order to answer questions and keep the ball rolling. We also commit to having bi-weekly meetings with MLH mentor(s) during the duration of the program.

Kiwi TCMS would also like to thank our friend Eddie Jaoude for putting us in touch with MLH and helping bring this partnership to reality. Thank you Eddie!

Help us do more

If you like what we're doing and how Kiwi TCMS supports various communities please help us!

• Donate via Open Collective as low as 1 EUR;
• Nominate Kiwi TCMS as GitHub Stars;
• Become a customer and we'll share our profits with the community

Thanks for reading and happy testing!

Hello testers, as you know our friends at Pionir are working on physical hardware which can be used for interactive training and explanation of the Black-box testing technique. The inspiration comes from James Lyndsay’s Black Box Puzzles and Claudiu Draghia.

We have the source code of 3 boxes already published at https://github.com/kiwitcms/black-boxes but still missing bill of materials, design files for 3D printing and some basic instructions how to put everything together. There was a delay in delivery of some components but most of the work is close to completion. You may subscribe to issues for each box to follow the progress! Here are some images & videos from the development process.

Wason 2-4-6 box

Peltzman effect box

Salience bias box

According to Pionir's own words: We are testing the salience box and trying to cause emotional effect of an element. Vuk made a mistake and now he can't turn it off :D. How's that for dogfooding?

Help us do more

If you like what we're doing and how Kiwi TCMS supports the various communities around us please nominate us as GitHub Stars!

Thanks for reading and happy testing!

We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS is going to partner with Pionir on the development of open source hardware for testers! Pionir is a free school focused on creating a new generation of digital leaders, an exponential culture and solving challenges using technology. They are located in Kikinda, Serbia.

This is not our first collaboration - the students are already aware of the Kiwi TCMS project and last year they participated in presentation & workshop hosted by Alex. Zamphyr, the organization behind Pionir, is also one of the first open source projects on our OSS program!

Black boxes for black-box testing

Black-box testing is a method of software testing that examines the functionality of the subject under test without peering into its internal structures or workings. It is often performed by manipulating the possible inputs and examining the resulting output. Experienced black-box testers often develop a hunch for where bugs my be and it is not uncommon for them to discover some obscure problems nobody else thought about. More often than not the basis for this is developing an understanding/expectation how the SUT works by careful exploration during many iterations. Thus being able to explore a SUT, observe its behavior, keep mental notes about possible relations between input-behavior-output and analyzing what is happening under the hood becomes an important skill for testers.

The idea for having something unknown to explore & train your skills first comes from James Lyndsay’s Black Box Puzzles and was more recently implemented by Claudiu Draghia. Now it's our turn!

Project description

Pionir will be developing hardware black boxes for teaching exploratory testing in cooperation with Kiwi TCMS. We have dedicated €2000 from our bounty program for students of the free school towards completing this project.

The goal of the project is to produce at least 3 boxes and reference designs that will serve as a didactic tool for teaching, but also be free and open hardware, and as such, available to everyone to build from source.

This project will be trusted to the students of the free school who will get opportunity to take part in the challenging process of building a digital appliance, from designing the machine logic, to develop and prototype hardware.

The project includes designing, assembling, programming, documenting and delivering this hardware to us! Everything is expected to be open source: list of components, assembly instructions, 3D design files, source code, documentation and instructions! Our goal is that this will be relatively cheap and easy to build so everyone else can build their own boxes. During the next several months there will be new repositories created under https://github.com/kiwitcms to host the various boxes.

The black boxes are expected to be available in October 2020 - just in time for the upcoming conference season where members of the larger testing and open source communities will be able to practice with them!

Call for sponsors

We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!

Vote for Kiwi TCMS

Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is donating € 10000 (ten thousand euro) to our community to enable more hands working together and give an opportunity for people to get exposed to open source contributions. You can read more about the rules of the program in Round 01!

Bounties announced in Round 02

Custom pylint plugins:

#736, #738, #1126, #1303, #1384

Automation tests:

#1596, #1597, #1598, #1599, #1600, #1601, #1602, #1603, #1604, #1605, #1606, #1607, #1608, #1609, #1610, #1611, #1612, #1613, #1614, #1615, #1616, #1617, #1618, #1619, #1620, #1621, #1622, #1623, #1624, #1625, #1626, #1627, #1628, #1629, #1630, #1631

Call for sponsors

We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!

Vote for Kiwi TCMS

Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is donating € 10000 (ten thousand euro) to our community to enable more hands working together and give an opportunity for people to get exposed to open source contributions. You will help us complete pending tasks faster while learning something new and receive a bonus for your efforts! This blog post outlines the rules of our open source bounty program.

Who is eligible to participate

Everyone who meets the following criteria is eligible to participate:

• Has an account on https://opencollective.com - needed to follow program updates and request payments
• Has a bank account - needed for actual money transfer, more info below!

If you are beginner in Python, Django or some other technology that we use please consider available documentation, your local user group, developers forum and StackOverflow to get help. Do not turn GitHub issues into a "getting started in programming" discussion.

Engagement rules

• Program will be split into multiple rounds as we work to clearly define what needs to be done and adjust priorities
• News and updates will be posted at https://opencollective.com/kiwitcms/updates/
• You are expected to mostly work alone on issues
• Technical discussion will be happening via GitHub pull requests and/or GitHub issues under https://github.com/kiwitcms/Kiwi unless indicated otherwise
• Translation related discussion will be happening via Crowdin under https://crowdin.com/project/kiwitcms/discussions when needed
• Do not contact individual team members privately, we are going to ignore such messages

FIFO order for code review

• Contributions will be reviewed and merged in a rolling first-in-first-out order, that is we review 1 PR and while waiting for updates continue on the next in the queue
• In case of collisions, multiple contributions that try to resolve the same problem, our team will review the first one, then the second one, etc. The pull request which is first to pass DoD and code review will be merged and the conflicting ones closed
• Please comment on issues and work together with other community members to split the work and avoid collisions as much as possible

About issues

Our team will try to clearly describe each task and what constitutes a successfully completed task, e.g. definition of done (DoD). If this isn't the case please ask questions and seek clarification about such tasks.

• Only Issues under the bounty-program milestone AND labelled with a specific monetary amount are eligible for payout!
• Unlabelled issues need further refinement before they can be accepted for bounties!

Payout rules

Once DoD has been met and the contribution is merged you may claim the assigned bounty. You must perform the following steps:

• Submit an expense to the Kiwi TCMS Collective
• All expenses submitted to the Kiwi TCMS Collective must follow the invoicing rules of our Fiscal Host. Here is an invoice template (Google Doc) you can use. Fill-in the blue parts and leave the black parts
• Invoice & expense description contains the number of issue(s) and PR(s) for which bounty is claimed

Identity cross validation:

Once an expense has been submitted add a comment with your GitHub/Crowdin username to it + open a new issue in GitHub /new discussion in Crowdin with link to the expense submission. This will help us cross-validate that we are talking to the same person between platforms.

Note on bank transfers

A message from our Fiscal Host:

We currently prefer to do payouts using bank transfers. We used to support PayPal but fees were way too high for the collectives.

About bank transfer, we do EU transfers as well as non EU (which takes more time obviously).

We noticed that several collectives are now using Revolut bank accounts which is the easiest and cheapest way (it’s free) to receive money anywhere in the world.

It looks like the fastest & cheapest way to get paid is via Revolut account if you have one, followed by standard bank transfer and PayPal account is last!

Bounties: translation related tasks

• Chinese Simplified - #1459, #1460 #1461, #1462, #1463
• Hindi - #1464, #1465 #1466, #1467, #1468
• Indonesian - #1469, #1470 #1471, #1472, #1473
• Bengali - #1474, #1475 #1476, #1477, #1478
• German - #1505, #1506, #1507, #1508, #1509
• Japanese - #1489, #1490 #1491, #1492, #1493
• Swahili - #1494, #1495 #1497, #1498, #1499
• Vietnamese - #1484, #1485 #1486, #1487, #1488
• Korean - #1479, #1480 #1481, #1482, #1483

Bounties: test automation plugins

• Django test runner reporting plugin - #693
• py.test reporting plugin - #1511
• JUnit plugin: annotation & improvement for test case mapping - #1512
• TestNG plugin - #692

Bounties: assorted technical issues

• pylint - #1192
• JavaScript: Add buttons for creating tables in text editor - #1531
• Migration from Travis CI to GitHub workflows - #1550, #1551, #1552, #1553, #1554

Call for sponsors

We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!

Vote for Kiwi TCMS

Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Happy bounty hunting!